Feb 27, 2020
This is Part IV of a series that will outline the different ways we can adjust and tailor our answering service system to meet the needs of funeral and death care related organizations. In Part I, we examined how ASD supports casket and vault companies. In Part II, we explored how ASD helps cemeteries. In Part III, we took a look at the different ways our answering service can serve the needs of pet loss professionals. In Part IV, we will discuss how ASD helps mortuary science and medical colleges handle anatomical body donation calls.
“I’m just a vendor, so I don’t think I can use your services.”
Believe it or not, the sentence above has resulted in countless invaluable conversations and relationships between ASD and other funeral-related businesses. At conventions around the country, the ASD team is often given the opportunity to meet fellow exhibitors and learn about different organizations that contribute to funeral service. Many are very surprised to learn about the numerous ways our answering service can be customized to meet their specific needs. This is part of our company’s commitment to providing communication options and solutions to the entire death care profession. We can adjust and tailor our answering service system to meet the needs of funeral and death care related organizations.
In addition to funeral homes, ASD also serves funeral-related businesses and organizations such as casket suppliers, mortuary science colleges and transport companies. If you work in any field related to death care and receive phone calls, ASD has a solution in place for you. Recently, we introduced an enhanced version of our message system that gives our clients the ability to fully customize how information is obtained from callers. Drop down lists, conditional information fields, and special instructions can now easily be added to our message templates. This unrivaled functionality allows you to control the entire trajectory of any call we handle for you and oversee how message details are organized.
Support For Medical Universities & Mortuary Science Colleges
While studying how to become embalmers and funeral directors, mortuary science students work with cadavers that are donated to science. Donated cadavers are also used by medical students for anatomy education. ASD works with medical and mortuary colleges across the country to help them field calls relating to body donation. Many anatomical donor programs receive calls from various individuals including family members, nurses, social workers and other funeral homes. Recent statistics show that body donation to medical schools are on the rise. MedCure, one of three national body donation organizations, reports a 36% increase over the last five years.
While these university programs are not typically staffed 24/7, they often receive calls at all hours of the day with time-sensitive questions. ASD helps ensure these urgent calls are fielded properly. We work closely with universities to determine what information must be gathered during body donation calls. Clients can specify what data is gathered by ASD depending on the person who is calling. We can also add custom fields for information that must be obtained, such as the cause of death or donor identification number. Gathering this information is vital as it often determines if a donor is eligible for body donation.
In this example, the medical university requests ASD to ask specific questions and gather important details including if the donor is registered with the body donation program, the cause of death and if the deceased had an infectious or contagious disease.
In addition to gathering specific information, ASD can also relay special instructions to callers. For instance, on one of our medical university accounts, the client instructs ASD to tell EMT, Police and First Responders to contact a medical examiner first to release the body if they cannot pronounce the death. ASD’s message templates allow medical and mortuary science universities to maintain full control over how their calls are handled and dispatched. This level of customization, combined with our extensive training program, is unparalleled among answering services and has made ASD’s the chosen call support partner for many universities across the country.
Using an answering service for your funeral-related business is a simple solution that can prevent missed calls, overlooked orders and lost clients. As we all know, the funeral profession is unlike any other. The 24/7 demands coupled with the short timeframe to plan a service and final disposition require directors to work only with the most responsive organizations. Automated systems are no longer enough to meet the needs of this profession as they so often cause frustration, unnecessary delays and misunderstandings. As the answering service trusted by more than 7,000 funeral homes across the United States, ASD is the only company with the training and technology solutions in place to help funeral related businesses of all kinds enhance their communications to better serve the funeral profession.
Still not convinced? We offer a 30-Day no-risk FREE TRIAL for all of our new clients so you can test out all of our technology, including our Custom Messaging Templates, to decide if we are a good fit for your business. To learn more, email Sales@myASD.com or call 800-868-9950 and ask for Craig.
RELATED READING:
How ASD’s Custom Messaging Supports Cemeteries
How ASD’s Custom Messaging Supports Casket and Vault Companies
How ASD’s Custom Messaging Supports Pet Loss Professionals
About The Author
Jess Farren (Fowler)
Jess Farren (Fowler) is a Public Relations Specialist and Staff Writer who has been a part of the ASD team since 2003. Jess manages ASD’s company blog and has been published in several funeral trade magazines. She has written articles on a variety of subjects including communication, business planning, technology, marketing and funeral trends. You can contact Jess directly at Jess@myASD.com
